The framework of linear relations started with awareness of how efforts could be reduced and usefulness increased. The linear sequence of activities was deterministically connected-the stronger the person, the more powerful in throwing, thrusting and hauling; the longer the legs, the faster the run, etc. Language was a product of the change from the circular framework, embodied in foraging, but also a factor affecting the dynamics and the direction followed, i.e., agriculture. In language the circle was opened in the sense that sequences were made possible and generality, once achieved, generated further levels of generality. From direct interaction coordinated by instinct, biological rhythm, etc., to interaction coordinated by melodic sound, movement, fire signals, to communication based on words, the human species ascertained its existence among other species. It also ascertained a sense of purpose and progression.
The pragmatics of myths is one of progression. It extends well into our age, in forms that suit the scale of humankind-progression from tribal life to the polis, ancient cities-and its activities. In today's terminology, we can look at myths as algorithms of practical life. In the ritual, giving birth, selecting a mate, fruitful sexual relations-all related to reproduction and death-could be approached within the implicit circularity of action-reaction. In myths, the word of the language conveys a relatively depersonalized experience available to each and all. Since it was objectified in language, it took on the semblance of rules. In language, things are remembered; but also forgotten, or made forgotten, for reasons having to do with new circumstances of work and social life. Change in experience was reflected in the change of everything pertinent to the experience as it was preserved in language. Quite often, in the act of transmitting experience, details were changed, myths were transmuted. They became new programs for new goals and new circumstances of work.
Generally speaking, the emergence and cultural acquisition of language and the change of status of the human being from Homo Faber (tool-using human) to Homo Sapiens (thinking human) were parallel processes within the pragmatic framework of linear relations between actions and results. The pre-language stage of relatively homogeneous activities, of directness and immediateness, of relative equality between the effort and the result progressively came to an end. The need to describe, categorize, store, and retrieve the content of diversified, indirect, mediated experience was projected into the reality of language, within the experience of human self- constitution. The relevance of experience to the task at hand was replaced by the anticipated relevancy of structuring future tasks in order to minimize effort and maximize outcome.
Frames of existence
The oral phase of language made it difficult, if not impossible, to account for past events. Testimony in communities researched while still in the oral phase (see Lévi- Strauss, among others) shows that they could not maintain the semantic integrity of the discourse. Words uttered in a never-ending now-the implicit notion of present-seem to automatically reinvent the past according to the exigencies of the immediate. The past, during the oral phase of language, was a form of present, and so was the future, since there are no instruments to project the word along the axis of time.
Orality is associated with fixed frames of existence and practical life. The culture of the written word resulted from the introduction of a variable frame of existence, within which a new pragmatic framework, corresponding to a growing scale of human activity, required a stable outline of language. This outline of language-over short time intervals it appears as a fixed frame of reference-can be associated with more mobile, more dynamic frames of existence and practical experiences, whose output follows the dynamic of the linear relations it embodies. Work and social interaction-in short, the pragmatic dimension of human existence-made the recording of language necessary and impressed linearity upon it.
A cuneiform notation, over 3,500 years old, testifies to a Sumerian who looked at the nightly skies and saw a lion, a bull, and a scorpion. More importantly, it demonstrates how a practical experience constitutes a cognitive filter: what people saw when they looked at something unknown and for which no name was constituted, and how disjoint worlds-the earthly environment and the sky-were put in relation at this phase of language constitution. This is even more important in view of the fact that as an isolated language, Sumerian survives only in writing, a product of that "budding flower" as A. and S. Sherrat described it, referring to the agricultural heartland of Southwest Asia where many language families originated.
Writing, which takes place in many respects at a higher cognitive level than the production and utterance of the word, or than in pictographic notation, is a multi- relational device. It makes possible relations between different words, between different sentences, between images and language. From its incipient phase, it also related disjoint worlds, but at a level other than that achieved in Sumerian cuneiform notation. Writing facilitates and further necessitates the next level of a language, which is the text, an entity in which its parts lose their individual meaning while the whole constitutes the message or is conjured into meaning. The experience already gained in visual records, such as drawing, rock engravings, and wood carvings, was taken over in the experience of the written word.
The pictorial was a highly complex notation with a vast number of components, some visible (the written), some invisible (the phonetics), and few rules of association. Within the pictorial, sequences are formed which narrate events or actions in their natural succession. What comes first in the sequence is also prior (in time) to everything else, or it has a more important place in a hierarchy. The male-female relation, or that between free individuals and slaves, between native and foreign was embedded here. Even the direction of writing (from left to right, right to left, top to bottom) encodes important information about the people constituting their identity in the practical experience of engraving letters on tablets or painting them on parchment. The very concrete nature of the pictograms prevents generalization. Expression was enormously rich, precision practically impossible to achieve.
The detailed history of writing makes up many chapters in the history of languages. It is also a useful introduction to the history of knowledge, aesthetics, and most likely cognitive science. This history also details processes characteristic of the beginning of literacy. Probably more than 30,000 years passed between the time of cave paintings and rock engravings and the first acknowledged attempt at writing. From the perspective of literacy, this time span comprised the liberation of the human being from the pictorially concrete and the establishment of the realm of conventions, of purposeful encoding. Abstract thinking is not possible without the cognitive support of abstract representations and the sharing of conventions (some implicit) they embody. The wedge-shaped letters of Sumerian cuneiform, the sacred engraved notations of Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Chinese ideograms, the Hebrew, Greek, and Roman alphabets-all have in common the need to overcome concreteness. They offer a system of abstract notation for increasingly more complex languages.